Spellslinger 6: Crownbreaker

by Sebastien de Castell

  ‘The viziers seek control,’ the Path of Floating Lilies said. ‘They always have, but they’ve lacked the means to attain it. This little Daroman queen and her father before her were too prone to wisdom and restraint. My people live surrounded by desert. It breeds in us the kind of thirst others cannot comprehend, and now our thirst will only be quenched with the blood of enemies.’

  What they were saying was true. I knew it in my bones. Every experience I’d had travelling the long roads with Ferius, from the Jan’Tep territories to the Seven Sands, from Darome to Gitabria, and even to a land across the water, this war was like a machine being built before our eyes, gears attaching to other gears, with every culture helping to turn them until it became a behemoth that would trample across the continent.

  Our thirst will only be slaked with the blood of enemies, Lily had said.

  We were going to have to provide them an enemy soon.

  City of Peace

  The whole world longs for a land of peace, a shining city upon a hill, without walls, without guards.

  They’re so much easier to sack that way.

  58

  The Intruder

  I lost track of the days for a while. The desert does that to you: by horse or camel you trudge along slippery paths, hour after hour, the sun rising and falling, the air becoming so hot you have to keep your mouth closed to avoid drying out your throat, then so cold you shiver in your tent all night. But I’d journeyed through deserts before, and as much as I hated them, their rhythms were familiar to me. What was different this time were the thoughts that haunted me along the way.

  Shujan was dying. Whatever had been done to him to turn him into a believable imposter for a living god hadn’t been designed to keep him alive beyond his first birthday. He slept, mostly, wrapped inside a nest of blankets we’d strapped in front of Torian’s saddle whenever we rode. For some reason she’d designated herself in charge of his care.

  Ferius was dying too. Despite Nephenia’s charms and the healing tricks the other Argosi with us had discovered on their travels. Rosie, Lily and the man who kept trying and failing to get Ferius to go back to calling him the Path of Mountain Storms instead of ‘Stormy’ all shared in my despair as we watched her put on that brave face of hers day after day.

  The malediction was relentless. Small things mostly. Accidents that caused her to trip when she shouldn’t have, the resulting wound never quite easing in the way it gnawed at her. The curse was slowly eating her alive.

  ‘Quit starin’, kid,’ she’d say every time she caught me checking on her. ‘Gonna make me blush.’

  At night she spent a lot of time with Rosie, the two of them sitting up in their tent, playing cards, arguing. Sometimes they were careful to make no sounds at all, and the rest of us knew well enough not to probe further.

  Well, except Reichis, of course.

  ‘They’re doin’ it again,’ he’d chitter at me in our own little tent at night.

  ‘Shut up, Reichis.’

  ‘I’m just sayin’, maybe you should watch.’

  ‘What? Why would I—’

  ‘Well,’ he reasoned, ‘you never seem to seal the deal with human females, and now Nephenia’s back and I’m tired of watching you pine over her. So I figure maybe the problem is you’re worried you won’t know how to please her when the two of you start—’

  I wrapped the folded blanket I was using as a pillow around my ears. ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’

  ‘I mean, I could give you pointers, but squirrel cat anatomy isn’t exactly the same. I mean, our females really like it when you bite—’ He suddenly perked up, his nose twitching as he sniffed at the air.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I thought I smelled …’

  ‘Reichis, what is it?’

  He got off his rump and sauntered right past me, out the front flap of our little tent and off into the desert beyond our camp. I followed behind him, trying to get his attention without waking the others, but to no avail. It was as if he were being drawn by some phantasm conjured up by a mage’s silk spell.

  Just over two hundred yards from camp, past the crest of a tall dune, I found what had lured Reichis away. Was she beautiful? I couldn’t say. Female squirrel cats aren’t exactly my area of expertise.

  ‘I gotta go,’ Reichis said.

  ‘What do you mean you’ve got to go?’ I demanded. ‘We’re less than a day from where the queen’s army is massing in preparation for war! We’ve got bigger problems than … Reichis?’

  ‘I gotta go, Kellen.’

  Without looking back, without even so much as a proper goodbye, he wandered off into the desert with the other squirrel cat, leaving me standing there like an idiot. I felt like shouting at him, calling him a coward and a traitor for abandoning me now of all times. The only thing was, I remembered something Ferius had started to say when we were travelling through here on our way to Berabesq. She’d been trying to warn me that Reichis had been away from his own kind too long, that it wasn’t right for him to give that up just to go on watching my back all the time instead of creating a life – a family – for himself. If there was a tribe of squirrel cats out here, shouldn’t he have the right to find them?

  A cough alerted me to someone behind me. I spun around to find the Path of Mountain Storms standing there.

  ‘What are you doing up?’ I asked. ‘I thought Lily was on watch tonight.’

  ‘She is. Ferius had me scout ahead, to make sure we weren’t heading into an ambush.’

  That made sense. While our enemies wouldn’t have known our precise location, if they assumed we were heading for the queen’s encampment at the Berabesq border, then all they had to do was draw a straight line between that and Makhan Mebab and somewhere along the way they’d find us.

  ‘How many of them?’ I asked.

  ‘Just one,’ he replied. ‘Ferius said you’d know who it was. She also told me to tell you and no one else. She said the play was up to you, and the rest of us shouldn’t interfere.’

  A weight descended on my shoulders, almost heavier than I could bear. ‘She’s right,’ I said at last. ‘This is my responsibility.’

  He locked eyes with me, no doubt using some of the same Argosi skills Ferius had taught me to see if he could understand whether this was the right move or whether I was about to condemn us all. ‘You sure you don’t want back-up?’

  ‘Don’t reckon it would help,’ I said.

  The Path of Mountain Storms pointed northward. ‘About a quarter-mile ahead, I think. Couldn’t actually see anyone at first. No tracks, no fire, nothing.’

  ‘Then how did you figure out someone was—’

  He gave a passable impression of Ferius’s drawl. ‘When there ain’t a single sign of an ambush, that’s when ya know for sure trouble’s comin’.’

  I smiled at that. I was going to miss all those sayings of hers.

  I took off alone, my feet suddenly having trouble finding purchase on the loose sand. My hands started to shake before I’d gone a hundred paces.

  I guess I’d always known I was going to die in the desert one day.

  59

  Reunion

  Berabesq’s northern region digs into the borders of three nations, like the three prongs of a trident: Darome to the north-east, the Seven Sands in the middle, and the Jan’Tep territories to the north-west. That paints a false picture though, because it makes it sound as if all these countries are geographically comparable to one another. They’re not. The Berabesq lands are huge, spanning more of the continent than almost all the other countries combined. The mighty Daroman empire, by comparison, isn’t half so big. The Seven Sands are even smaller. And my homeland? Well, let’s just say you could fit the Jan’Tep territories into Berabesq fifty times and there’d still be room for more.

  The same calculation works if you think in terms of population. They could swallow us up, every Jan’Tep mage from lords magi down to lowly initiate, every Sha’Tep cook, clerk and servant, the
young, the old, the living and the dead, a dozen times over and still be hungry.

  When you grow up with the marvel of magic all around you, it seems inconceivable that the rest of the world could see your nation as small. Weak. Trivial. Sometimes we were feared as potential spies or assassins, it’s true, but most often we were seen as quirks of nature. Unusual, but ultimately insignificant novelties on a continent dominated by great armies and ever more sophisticated machines of war.

  How does such a nation survive, slowly crushed between growing empires and powerful mercantile interests? And what if – instead of mere survival – what you really wanted was to rule? To overwhelm the disbelievers and prove yourself once and for all their superiors?

  Now wouldn’t that be a clever trick?

  ‘Hello, Father,’ I said quietly.

  I still couldn’t see him. Obscurement spells are funny things – easy to cast (if you’ve sparked your silk band), but hard to perfect. Few had the patience to work out all the kinks, to practise the esoteric geometries and calculate the exact somatic shapes required to make oneself invisible. Shalla was about the best at it I’d ever seen, but even with her, if you knew to look you’d find certain flaws in the air, a subtle, nagging feeling of someone watching you.

  Ke’heops, by comparison, was a bit of an amateur. I could see now how the Path of Mountain Storms had sensed something wrong nearby.

  ‘Ke’helios,’ my father’s voice replied.

  ‘Kellen,’ I corrected.

  A sigh. ‘And isn’t that the crux of it all?’

  A shimmer in the air preceded the release of his spell. He was standing closer to me than I’d anticipated – one of the many reasons I hate obscurement magic.

  ‘You’d think a name was far too small a thing to bother a lord magus, never mind a clan prince and the mage sovereign of the entire Jan’Tep people,’ I said.

  My father smiled, a small, unexpected thing that seemed to surprise even him. ‘Flattery? That’s a new trick for you, isn’t it?’

  He had a point – my usual assortment of tactics revolved around infuriating him through various insults both subtle and overt. So why not now? I suppose for two reasons. First, because it was far too late for such childish acts of rebellion, and second, because there was something I very much needed to tell him. ‘I’m sorry about Bene’maat … Mother, I mean.’

  It was a long time before he spoke. ‘Do you miss her?’

  The question took me aback. I suppose neither of us was in the mood for our usual ploys. ‘I miss … I miss the way she smelled in the morning, after she’d spent the night making those astronomical charts of hers, that scent that came from those longs rolls of parchment she used.’

  ‘It was the inks actually. She made them herself. Bene’maat never trusted the ones traders brought to our city – claimed they blotted on the parchment and her work was too precise.’

  ‘Precise,’ I repeated. Such a good word to describe her. Every word she uttered, every action she took, was so finely tuned somehow, as if she’d spent endless hours deciding what must be done before approaching the task at hand.

  ‘She loved you,’ Ke’heops said. ‘I know that must be hard to accept, given how things ended when you left us. She never forgave me for forcing her hand, making her choose between her faith in me and her desire to protect you. The counter-banding we performed on you … She wore the shame of it like scars across every part of her body.’

  ‘That’s why she went to Berabesq, wasn’t it? To discover the secrets of how the Arcanists devised the inscriptions that give the Faithful their powers.’ I held up my right forearm. ‘That’s what this ember sigil is, isn’t it? A different kind of inscription designed by Mother to create new pathways that can bypass the counter-glyphs.’

  He nodded.

  ‘You let me believe she went there to spy for you.’

  ‘No son should ever carry the weight of his mother’s death upon his shoulders.’

  I had to clench my teeth to keep from saying something I’d regret. There was more to the story, most of which I’d surmised by now, but some small part of me hesitated to confront Ke’heops. I didn’t want to give up that last tiny thread that still bound us together as father and son.

  ‘Did she ask for me? I mean, at the end?’

  Ke’heops nodded. ‘The malediction broke her mind in those final days. She wanted so badly to speak to you, to hear your voice, to beg your forgiveness.’

  He said it without ire, without any attempt to induce guilt in me, yet I felt the stab all the same. I didn’t want to let him see, so instead I turned my thoughts to what must have happened next, and that brought a little comfort to me.

  ‘Shalla told her she’d spoken to me, didn’t she?’

  One of my father’s perfectly formed eyebrows rose a fraction. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Because she’s Shalla. She likes to fix things. People, mostly. I imagine she went to Mother’s bedside, squeezing her hand excitedly. “I cast a spell, Mother. I found Kellen and told him. He’s very far away, otherwise he’d ride here to see you. He wept for you, Mother, and begged me – yes, silly, arrogant Kellen begged me – to tell you that he forgave you long ago. He misses you, Mother, and he loves you very much.”’

  Ke’heops laughed at my outrageous impression. ‘My daughter can be rather … predictable, at times.’

  I laughed too, disarmed by my father’s momentary descent from his usual lofty perch as head of the House of Ke, into simple parental sentiment. ‘Did Mother believe her?’

  A sombreness returned to him. ‘I hope so. She wanted to.’ A pause. ‘So did I, but I know better.’

  ‘It’s strange,’ I said. ‘A year ago, a month ago … maybe even yesterday, I’d’ve said you were right. Some things are unforgivable, or at least I thought they were.’ I shook my head. ‘I can never get that image out of my mind, even now. The straps binding me to that table, the two of you standing over me. The needle in your hand, the metallic ink dripping from the end, biting into my skin.’

  ‘I see it too,’ he said softly. ‘I see my own hand moving, pressing the needle into your forearm, drawing the counter-sigils. I scream at myself to stop, tell myself there’s another way. There has to be another way.’

  I rolled up the right sleeve of my shirt. The counter-banded tattoos used to look so ugly to me, a hideous reminder not only of what was taken from me, but of who had taken it. Now though? ‘I never would have left home had you and Mother not done that to me.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘No, I mean …’

  How was I supposed to explain this to him? Travelling the long roads with Ferius, learning to survive with nothing more than a few Argosi tricks … arta eres, arta loquit, arta tuco; leaving behind dreams of having power over others in return for the knowledge that sometimes even the smallest, simplest, most human things, like learning to stand up straight and listen to a girl with your eyes, can be as magical as any spell; meeting Seneira in the Seven Sands, falling for her, discovering love isn’t the same as infatuation, and neither one is a cure for loneliness; running scared from the shadowblack, only to learn it’s just as awful as I’d been told and yet, somehow, didn’t have to be nearly so scary. Nephenia showing up every once in a while to turn my life upside down and remind me that I couldn’t love anyone else until I learned to love myself. And Reichis. Always Reichis. The damned squirrel cat, who’d just walked out on me because he happened to catch the scent of a female of his species. The worst business partner in the entire world. The best friend I could ever have hoped for.

  My life had been one mad, terrifying hell, and yet so full of outlandish wonders I laughed out loud just thinking of them all. I would’ve had none of that if I’d been allowed the life I’d always dreamed of – if my parents hadn’t taken magic away from me.

  ‘I do forgive Mother,’ I said finally. ‘I forgive you too, Father.’

  ‘Truly?’

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen my father cry
before. Even now, there was a kind of stern nobility to that lone tear at the corner of his eye.

  ‘Truly.’

  I took in a long, slow breath, and very carefully flipped open the clips on my powder holsters. ‘But I won’t let you pass.’

  Neither my words nor my actions surprised him, but they seemed to hurt him nonetheless. I expected him to threaten or scold me, to remind me of just how much power he possessed, and how well he knew all my tricks. I thought perhaps he’d accuse me of lying just now when I’d claimed to forgive him.

  So I was surprised when he asked, ‘Will you allow me to explain myself, first, before either of us takes that final step from which we can never turn back?’

  I hesitated. What paltry advantages I have in a duel come from fast hands and keeping people off-guard by saying things that make them falter in their own attacks. That my father was not simply offering to explain himself, but actually asking for my permission, told me several things. The first was that there was a lot more to the story than I knew.

  The second was that we weren’t alone.

  60

  Dreams of Sand

  ‘Where is she?’ I asked.

  I suppose I should’ve felt gratified that my father didn’t try to lie to me. ‘Your sister is nearby. Listening.’

  ‘She asked you to give me one more chance, didn’t she?’

  He nodded. ‘Sha’maat has always believed that if I were to be honest with you, truly and completely honest, that you’d begin to see why the actions you deem so despicable have been necessary for the survival of our people, that given this understanding, you and I could …’ He glanced back in the darkened desert to a spot I couldn’t see. ‘Sha’maat believes the truth will bring you back to us.’

  I swallowed a dozen shrewd observations, a hundred mean-spirited retorts. None of them were clever enough to warrant the hurt they’d cause. Maybe I was finally becoming the man Ferius had been trying to teach me to become, the one Nephenia saw sometimes when she looked at me with that faraway stare right before disappearing from my life again. In the end, though, I think it was just that I’d already witnessed more suffering and heartache than I could stand lately, and I knew there was more to come.